Life lessons – V Lynn Connelly

I Couldn’t Keep Up

Am I overscheduled or just poorly organized?

Photo by Author: Buddy, pooping out twenty yards from home, is about how I feel right now

I optimistically started blogging at the start of the year. But less than three months into my new endeavor, more than one something had to give, and I abandoned my newest activities, both writing and reading other bloggers, as well all social media. I’m still trying to find a way to balance everything, and at this moment, I’m wondering what the hell I was thinking.

“In real life,” I am a CPA/income tax manager, which requires intensely busy workdays and too much overtime for two months each spring and fall. I knew this when I set up my Twitter and Medium accounts and website and started writing. I budgeted my time accordingly, carving out a half hour five days a week, and wrote a few pieces in advance to post throughout the spring so as not to disappear if my plan didn’t work out.

And then life blew up, and even my backup plan didn’t work out.

It is now May 31, a full seven weeks after my work overtime ended, and I’m only just now able to think about writing and reading and interacting again, so I’m trying to figure out whether my inability to stick to my plan this spring will be an anomaly or my expectations were unrealistic.

Work itself was part of it. My firm touts its focus on well-being and work-life balance—admirable goals, and it’s not just lip service. But both have been elusive to many of us simply because there aren’t enough of us. Turnover is high, and those who stay are burning out. Over the last few years, leadership has implemented a grand plan which realigns teams, reassigns workloads, and redesigns or automates some processes and procedures for equity and greater efficiency.

I see the big picture and understand how it should help. But in practice, human beings resist change, and even those who embrace it get confused and fall back on old habits. This spring, complaints mounted, morale suffered, and I found myself holding hands that aren’t mine to hold anymore, taking calls which should have gone to others, and listening to people gripe, which left less time for my own work and caused me longer hours.

Part of this was on me. I like to be approachable and pride myself on great rapport with my colleagues and clients, but I need to set firmer boundaries and more assertively guard my time.

My personal life was a bigger problem, and so much that needed my attention/action felt out of my control.

In early March, my dog Buddy developed an autoimmune disorder (masticatory myositis), and his jaw muscles froze shut. But the standard treatment, heavy doses of prednisone to suppress the inflammation and his immune system, was almost as bad for him as the disease.

I didn’t understand this—when I’m on prednisone, I feel like superwoman! But his muscles atrophied to the point he could barely walk, and he was leaving puddles of urine and diarrhea on the kitchen floor two or three times a night. The vet switched his meds, but we had to wean him off the prednisone way more slowly than we’d have liked, and the new med caused nausea until he got used to it, so he stopped eating and drinking and became so listless I was sure it was the end.

I had to sleep on the couch for several weeks, both because he could no longer climb the stairs up to the bedroom and because he needed to go out so frequently. So, I didn’t sleep much or well, which made work even harder at the apex of peak season since my brain wasn’t functioning on all cylinders. *

During all this, my aunt fell, spent a week in the hospital, and passed away in late March. My uncle, her brother, had a heart attack a few weeks later and is still not out of the woods. These are my dad’s siblings, and he’s been gone for over twenty years, and they are like surrogate parents and my cousins more like siblings, so it’s been tough.

Some good things happened too, but they still required time and energy.

We had two family weddings between March and this week, preceded by two bridal showers. Another aunt turned 75, and we threw her a surprise party, which required a lot of stealth maneuvering to obtain old pictures of her since she is the primary keeper of the family photos. We also expended a lot of mental energy to keep our mouths shut at the afore-mentioned showers and weddings!

Social Security finally approved my brother Dan for disability pay after a two-year fight, and he received a huge lump sum of back pay in February. But because of this, he no longer qualified for the Medicaid that was paying for his health insurance and his nursing home (he’s been in skilled nursing care since being diagnosed with vascular dementia nearly three years ago).

But he also suddenly had enough money to private pay at an assisted living facility for at least a year before he’ll need Medicaid again, and he was convinced he could live on his own again, with a little help. He desperately wanted to live in his own space again rather than a shared hospital room, and I wanted that for him too, but I was concerned he couldn’t handle it (and, frankly, that I would end up needing to do even more for him).

Dan’s primary issue is short-term memory impairment, so learning a new facility, new routines, and new people will take him much longer than it would have before the dementia; his nursing home caretakers were concerned he would be isolated, confused, and depressed, which would hasten his deterioration.

But he’s compensating much better than he did at the beginning, and I felt he deserved a chance at regaining as much independence and privacy as he can handle for as long as he can handle it. So, we had several care conferences and assessments over three months with his nursing home team and the admissions folks at the assisted living facility to determine whether the move was advisable.

We did move him, but he’d lost almost all of his possessions three years ago when he was evicted while in the hospital, so we had to acquire and move all the usual furniture and household items you need to outfit an apartment. He finally settled in two weeks ago. **

And, my daughter, a digital nomad for the last eighteen months, rented an apartment nearby (she had been certain she would eventually land back in her college town, so I credit the dog for her change of heart!). Still in her twenties and unaccustomed to making huge financial commitments on her own, she asked me to help her tour possible places and shop for new furniture (if only we could have seen the future, I could have equipped my brother’s apartment with her cast-offs, but on her last move, she had finally junked the hand-me-downs she’d schlepped across the country several times since college).

She moved into the new place two weeks ago right as we were also moving my brother, and I’ve been going back and forth to both places to help unpack and assemble things.

It’s been a busy spring.

Or am I just making excuses?

I don’t know. But with four months out of the year insane because of work, and personal obligations filling the off-seasons, I’m wondering whether there’s any way I’ll be able to more than dabble in writing until I retire and/or the people and animals I take care of are gone.

If I were a “real writer,” could I make it work no matter what?

Am I not prioritizing or budgeting my time properly?

That feels unfair; I really did have a lot going on. But life is going to continue clamoring for my attention. How do I make time for writing?

Maybe after I recuperate from the recent chaos, I’ll find a helpful perspective.

*Buddy is doing much better now, thank goodness! He’s still weaker and slower than he was three months ago, but he’s finally off the prednisone as of this week, and his spirit is back. He’s playing with toys again, trotting occasionally on his walks, and climbing steps and pulling at the leash without falling over. He’ll be 10 years old soon, and I know he won’t live forever, but we hope he has a few good years left.

Photo by Author: Buddy is loving his walks again!

**My brother Dan is also doing well in his new place! It helped that, in a stroke of fantastic timing, his best buddy since childhood (really more of a sibling to him than I am) was already scheduled off work these past two weeks and has been over several times to hang out with him and help configure his new man cave. They are both thrilled!

Five Famous Memoirs I Read in 2022

Good writing begins with reading

Photo of stack of memoirs — Photo by Author

I’ve been reading a lot of memoir lately, and these books are a few of the juggernauts I read last year.

The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls

A friend gave me this fifteen years ago as I struggled to cope with my husband’s alcoholism and irrational behavior and feared what we were doing to our children. This book gave me hope that we weren’t ruining them forever (thankfully, we didn’t).

When I revisited it, I got the audiobook. The author herself narrates, and I enjoyed listening to her tell her own tales.

Jeannette Walls and her siblings grew up in dysfunction but parented themselves into successful adults. The kids moved to New York City as adults; their parents followed and became homeless but chose to live that way rather than conform to societal pressures.

She describes with love and compassion her brilliant, fascinating father who made wild promises but drank too much and didn’t keep them (or a job) and her eccentric, bohemian mother who couldn’t be bothered with pedestrian realities such as jobs and domestic obligations.

The family moved around a lot, and the children were often hungry and disappointed in their parents, but they experienced fun and adventure along with neglect and chaos. A journalist, Walls writes as an observer, not a critic, telling the events as they happened and letting the reader/listener feel the impact of her stories.

Ultimately, she weaves a tale of perseverance, forgiveness, and hope. I haven’t seen the movie, but it’s on my list.

Orange is the New Black, Piper Kerman

People kept mentioning this TV show to me when my friend Lisa was in jail. It was popular on Netflix then, but I’d never watched it. I didn’t know it was based on a memoir until recently.

In her youth, Piper Kerman got involved with an exotic older woman who turned out to be a drug runner and got Kerman to transport a suitcase of money overseas. A decade later, when she’s more settled and mature and engaged to be married, the smuggling ring is busted and her bad choice catches up with her. She serves time in the federal women’s prison in Danbury, CT.

In dozens of letters from both county jails while she awaited trial and federal prison after she was sentenced, Lisa relayed the same experiences Kerman expertly describes. I also learned some things Lisa had not understood that had seemed inexplicable, such as how prisoner transport works.

The daily humiliations and indignities forced on inmates are hard to read; we treat warehoused humans less kindly than animals. But Kerman is warm, funny, and non-judgmental about her fellow inmates, and her compassion reminds us they are complex human beings (many were mothers convicted of non-violent drug crimes), and the U.S. prison system is broken.

As educated, upper-middle-class white women, both Kerman and Lisa had the benefit of privilege, and their backgrounds and support systems undoubtedly made a huge difference in their ability to successfully assimilate back into life on the outside. I often wonder how both Kerman’s and Lisa’s fellow inmates fared once they were released.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, Cheryl Strayed

This might sound like a book about hiking, but it’s really about grief: how it ravaged her body and soul and how she finally healed herself.

Cheryl Strayed gives an unflinching account of her self-destructive choices after her beloved mother died from cancer when she was twenty-two. Bereft and lost, unable to bear her husband’s compassion, she drops out of school and turns to strangers for distraction. She has unprotected sex, devolves into drug use, and at one point becomes pregnant with a heroin addict’s baby.

I wanted to reach through the pages and shake sense into her at the same time I admired how she bared her pain and failures with no justifications or rationalizations.

To get her head on straight again, Strayed impulsively decides to hike the Pacific Crest Trail alone, though she has no hiking experience. The book follows her journey, including the people, animals, and scenery she encounters, while occasionally flashing back to show how she got there. She stumbles through the outer wilderness of the trail and the inner wilderness of loss and learns to forgive herself along the way.

I didn’t know this before and like the idea: Strayed is a name she chose after divorcing her husband. She didn’t want to keep his, couldn’t go back to hers, and settled on Strayed because it symbolized her identity and the power of her journey.

Reese Witherspoon played Cheryl in the movie and did justice to the intense emotion the book evokes.

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion

Another book about grief, this memoir is iconic. Joan Didion’s daughter was in the hospital on life support when her husband suffered a massive heart attack and died, and she writes about her experiences over the next year.

I’d never read it because grief is hard, and I didn’t want to immerse myself in someone else’s. When it came out, I had just lost my father and both grandmothers, my mother’s emotional abuse was becoming intolerable without my father to keep her in check, my husband’s alcoholic rages were escalating, and I felt unmoored.

But Al-Anon, which I joined a few years later, taught me I glean comfort from shared experience. I wish I’d picked this up earlier.

Didion so clearly describes the mental confusion, irrational thoughts and behaviors, and obsessive tendencies I’d experienced myself and saw in others. For example, when cleaning out her husband’s closet, she couldn’t bring herself to give away his shoes because he might need them when he came back.

Five years passed before Mom would let us empty Dad’s workshop. His fancy tools were a part of him, and as long as Mom kept it just the way he’d left it, she could believe he’d be back soon. She was so mean it was hard to have any compassion for her; this book helped me to grasp her pain and belatedly give her some grace.

Similarly, when Lisa disappeared and turned up in jail, her daughter gave me clothes to take to her bail hearing. They didn’t let her change, her bail was denied, and I drove around with those clothes in the trunk of my car for months afterward, making one excuse after another as to why I couldn’t return them to her family yet. She didn’t need them, so there was no rush, but what I couldn’t explain, because I knew it didn’t make any sense, was that I found comfort in having a piece of her with me.

Didion has been criticized for name-dropping and privilege, but that didn’t bother me because she was writing about her own life, and that was just how she lived. Being rich and famous didn’t protect her from the raw emotion of common human experience, and she brilliantly portrays the mess and illogic of deep grief.

Educated, Tara Westover

This was a powerful read that will stick with me.

Tara Westover is the youngest of seven children raised by paranoid, isolated, religious fundamentalists who trusted nobody—the government, medical professionals, educators. They never saw the inside of a school or hospital, even for major, life-threatening injuries. But they did visit the library, where Westover and one of her brothers learned to love reading and learning.

Westover’s father was a domineering misogynist who regularly put his children in harm’s way in his scrapping business, and her childhood was harrowing. One of her brothers emotionally and physically abused her, and everyone looked away. Yet her identity was wrapped up in her family, and she maintained a fierce loyalty to them that was tested when she decided to pursue formal education.

Westover faced an impossible choice: stay with her family and lose the education and future she longed for or continue her quest of discovery and lose her family. The title reveals her path, and it’s a remarkable tale.

Westover has been criticized as an unreliable narrator, questioning often whether something happened the way she remembers it, but I understood and related to this. When you’re abused and gaslit for years, especially from a young age, you don’t trust your own senses and memories. Her honesty when others remember certain events differently than she does makes her story ring true to me.

It’s hard to believe people live the way her family does in 21st-century United States; I know they do, I just don’t understand it, and this was a fascinating glimpse into religious fundamentalism and the survivalist mentality.

Westover overcoming her upbringing to obtain a Ph.D. from Cambridge is a testament to the power of resilience, education, and perseverance.

That Time We Got Free Super Bowl Tickets

Do we go to the game or profit by selling them?

Before cell phones and caller ID, answering the phone could be your greatest adventure or your worst nightmare, and often I would let the answering machine pick up. On this January day in 1995, I was glad I didn’t.

“Hey, do you want to go the Super Bowl this weekend?”

My husband’s voice was super casual, and I knew that wasn’t a real question.

“Sure,” I said. “Let me have my assistant find us tickets, clear my calendar, and book our private jet. What’s up?”

“I’m not kidding! David got tickets, and he can’t go. He offered them to me, but I need to let him know NOW, or he’ll find somebody else.”

“Seriously?! How much?” I started crunching numbers in my head — tickets, flights, hotel, food. I didn’t even know who was playing in the Super Bowl other than it wasn’t my local team, so I doubted it would be worth it.

“FREE!”

That did not compute. Those tickets must cost hundreds. But he was a salesman, and he was always getting local event tickets. David was his boss — could this be real?

“But last-minute flights —”

“Lynn, I said FREE!” Now he’d abandoned his cool, and I knew it was real. “The tickets and the flights and the hotel are all included! He just needs to change them from their names to ours.”

“But the kids —” They were six and two.

“My dad can probably come down if your parents can’t take them.”

I was staring out the window at the steely sky and brown slush left over from last week’s snowfall. The game was in Miami, and visions of palm trees and sunshine danced in my head.

My husband was one of the least adventurous people I knew, and he didn’t really like to travel, so if he was ready to jump on this, why was I arguing?

“Okay, let’s do it!”

We worked out childcare with our parents and found ourselves on a plane to Miami with a bunch of other people also going to the Super Bowl courtesy of the same TV station that had paid for our tickets.

Two guys near us were discussing ticket prices. Face value was $200; they had already sold them for $2,000 each and were going deep-sea fishing instead.

I looked at my husband. His eyes were wide, and I could see the question in them. $4,000 would be life-changing to us. Should we scalp our tickets?

I wasn’t a football fan and could not have cared less about the game itself. The adventure of such a high-profile, exclusive event was what appealed to me, as did bragging rights — nobody we knew had ever been to a Super Bowl!

But the money was alluring, too. We were saving for a down payment on a house, and that would put us over the top.

I wrestled with it for maybe thirty seconds.

“This is once-in-a-lifetime,” I said. “We could use the money, but we weren’t budgeting for it, and we won’t miss it. We might never get another chance to go to the Super Bowl.”

On game day, we arrived blocks from Joe Robbie stadium and walked past parking lots full of limos under a sky full of helicopters and blimps.

Glitterati sat all around us, and we felt like the small-town hillbillies we were. It was the 75th anniversary of the founding of the NFL, and pomp and circumstance ruled the day. I think we were both more excited than we’d been on our wedding day.

At half-time, we broke open glow sticks on cue. Afterward, I heard from everyone that it was one of the worst half-time shows ever, but I couldn’t see what they saw, and it was amazing to me. I enjoyed the spectacle and the music (Patti Labelle, Tony Bennett, Miami Sound Machine), and I was excited to be a part of it.

Photos by Author

All I remember of the game is that it was a blowout.

We were able to buy our first house later that year, even without the money the tickets might have brought us. I got a sweatshirt I still wear — they hold up well when you only put them on once a year — a commemorative seat cushion I used in the bleachers at my kids’ baseball and soccer games for the next sixteen years, and a story I still get to brag about.

I’ve never regretted that decision. The money would have been nice, but it would have quickly evaporated.

The once-in-a-lifetime lasting memory is priceless.

Losing Control and Finding Peace

I didn’t believe in Al-Anon’s first two steps until they restored me to sanity

My Al-Anon group* discussed “Step 2” this week, which is always a good reminder for me of what I should attend to (my own stuff) and what I should let go of (everyone else’s stuff).

To me, the first two steps are intertwined:

Step 1: We admitted we were powerless over alcohol—that our lives had become unmanageable.

Step 2: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

At the beginning, I fought these two steps with everything I had.

Sixteen years ago, a dear friend dragged me to my first Al-Anon meeting. Desperate to find a way to reach my increasingly irrational and abusive alcoholic husband, I just listened and cried. I didn’t say a word for months, but others’ stories touched me, and I found comfort knowing I wasn’t alone. I was relieved I didn’t have to explain what was happening or justify why I felt the way I did. They’d lived it too, and they understood.

I kept going.

But I didn’t buy the steps. I couldn’t be powerless! If I was powerless, I couldn’t change my situation, and that could not be true. I had agency; I just needed to find the right words to show him how he was hurting me, because surely, he didn’t mean to, and he didn’t realize it.

I hung in there waiting for the day they would finally tell me how to fix him.

In the meantime, I protected him. Like many loved ones of alcoholics, I tried to control every aspect of our lives to minimize the chaos my husband caused. I justified his absences, I covered up his mistakes, I insisted he didn’t mean those nasty things he said.

But I would get so upset with him when my attempts to control things inevitably failed that my anger and frustration spilled out everywhere. So what my kids primarily remember from that time is not how badly their father behaved, because that was just normal, but how irrationally their mother did.

To this day, they joke about “the year Mom went crazy.”

Step 1 wanted me to accept that my sense of control was an illusion and my attempts at controlling the situation were not working. To long-time control freaks like me, giving up control doesn’t come easily and looks a lot like losing control. Still, I resisted.

But then he turned on the kids.

Unlike me, my children have always had the gift of seeing their father for exactly who he is. They knew he drank too much, and they knew he was mean when he drank. They knew when to avoid him and when to ignore his words. He was a good dad most of the time, and they loved him. They didn’t bother trying to reason with him; they just kept their distance when prudent. I could have learned from them.

But as they got older and challenged our rules and opinions more, he belittled and harassed them more. I tried to deflect it, to take the blame, to rationalize his words. I would say, “Oh, he was just joking,” or “It’s the beer talking, not your dad.”

I wasn’t fooling anyone but myself.

Finally, when a freshman in college, my firstborn said to me:

“I don’t know why you put up with him, but I don’t have to anymore. My lease runs through August, so I’m going to stay at school and work up there this summer. I’m not coming home again if I have to live with him.”

That cleaver through my heart sliced through all my denial. I couldn’t fix this. My life had become unmanageable, and I was powerless.

My baby boy refusing to come home slammed me into rock bottom.

Step 1, check.

I went back to the Al-Anon lessons again and focused on what I hadn’t before. I was powerless over alcohol and my husband’s behavior, yes. My son was now an adult, and I was powerless over him, too. But I was not helpless. I was still in charge of my own choices and behaviors.

I could not change my husband, but I could change myself.

Step 2 seemed irreconcilable with my worldview, though. Al-Anon references the God of our understanding, and as a lapsed Catholic, I had grievances with the God I was raised to know. I wasn’t sure a power greater than myself even existed, but I especially couldn’t believe in a God who let terrible things happen to good people, and I refused to pray to a supreme being I was skeptical of.

But Al-Anon tells us to “take what you like and leave the rest.” I trusted my friends, ignored the God talk, and kept going.

And something magical happened when I finally admitted I was powerless over anyone but myself: I was also freed from responsibility for anyone but myself. An enormous, self-imposed weight fell away.

My mantra went from “I’ll take care of it” to “Not my problem.“

I accepted what I couldn’t change and began to change what I could. Solutions to my own problems came to me when I stopped wishing for a particular outcome and started wishing for whatever was best for me.

And without my stepping in to fix things, other people stepped up to take care of their own problems, or they experienced the consequences when they didn’t. Crises resolved themselves even when I didn’t lift a finger, or they blew up, but it wasn’t my fault.

Step 2 is reflected in the slogan, “Let go, and let God.” I can’t explain the God of my understanding, and I still don’t care to use the term God; if pressed, I’ll call it the universe. But something took over when I let go, and my mental health improved exponentially. It restored me to sanity, just as Step 2 had promised.

Many say:

“God took care of you.”

I say:

“The universe knew X was supposed to happen.”

Al-Anon says:

“Your higher power did for you what you couldn’t do for yourself.”

My concept of a higher power remains nebulous, but I’ve seen so many situations resolved in positive ways that I believe there’s something to it, even though I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just that the program and the group have infused me with their strength and hope so that my thinking is clearer.

When I stopped focusing on the semantics, I finally understood that what my higher power is and what I call it don’t matter. I just need to trust it.

Step 2, check.

I am not finished with the steps, though. We can’t check them off as if done forever.

Many people in my life still drink excessively, and their actions still affect me. I handle it better, but old fears and impulses can surface when I am stressed.

Steps 1 and 2 remind me to mind my own business and allow my loved ones the dignity to live the way they want. Even when I believe their choices are bad for them, it’s not my job to interfere or to take on their problems.

It’s not my place to decide what’s bad for them, anyway. They have their own higher powers.

Sometimes newcomers are dismayed to realize there’s no “graduation” from Al-Anon. They are in crisis, desperate for the magic wand that will fix their loved ones, as I had been. When they learn many of us have been coming for years or even decades and don’t see an ending date, they despair even more, unable to bear the idea of waiting that long to feel better.

Many, like me, can’t see the necessity of giving up control and don’t believe in a higher power.

I tell them:

I was a skeptic, but those steps I battled so hard ended up saving me.

We gently suggest they just keep coming back. We wish them well, we hope they return, and we let it go. They, too, have their own higher powers who will show them the light when they’re ready.

*For those unfamiliar, Al-Anon is a support group that helps loved ones of alcoholics recover from the effects someone’s drinking has had on our own lives, and we practice the Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous ourselves. Please feel free to reach out if you have questions.

Dear Future Me

A letter from my past self arrived

Machu Picchu, Peru, from the Sun Gate after an all-day hike
*Photos by Author*

As part of a wellness seminar at work, I wrote a letter to my future self* last year, but then I promptly forgot about it—it was that kind of year—so my letter surprised me right before Christmas. It was so weirdly right on the money, I’m sharing for whatever it tells you about me:

Dear Future Me,

Merry Christmas! You turned 55 this year, which you would have thought ancient even 20 years ago, but which now seems young enough to have a lot of living to do yet, especially compared to your aging relatives and friends (it’s also old enough to make you eligible for some less expensive condos and such in vacation type places you like to visit, so maybe take advantage of that!).

Hopefully, you have maintained your health. You have worked so hard on losing weight and getting more active again in the last 15 months, and you’ve done well. If you’ve fallen off the wagon, well, it happens. Try not to kick yourself. Remember how good you felt after getting healthy, especially in comparison to how bad you were feeling before, and try to re-commit.

Remember how your back hurt when you walked even 10 minutes? How much more would you have been able to see of Arizona and Utah if you didn’t have to limit your walking? How much more fun would the hike to Machu Picchu have been if you could have kept up with the kids (mental note: you might still owe Hubert a house)? Remember how anxious you were to travel on a plane—would the seatbelt even fit? You know you remember. If you did maintain your health, CONGRATULATIONS!! It isn’t easy, and you should be proud. Keep it up!

Your last few years have been difficult personally, trying to make sure Mom and Dan are taken care of without losing your sanity or too much of your own money. If they are still with you and you’re still feeling resentful, give yourself a break and try not to feel guilty. You’re only human, and they are not easy. So also don’t feel bad about doing things for yourself.

If one or both are gone now (even odds at least one is no longer with you), chances are that you aren’t sad and don’t miss them, so again, give yourself a break for that. After all, no one in the family misses them at all now, and they’re still here. It’s a sad situation, but it’s also not your fault. And it’s the big reason you try to be kind to others and live your life differently.

Speaking of that, are you still being a hermit like Dan used to be? People love you, and you love them, so try to get out more. You know you always enjoy time spent with family and friends even when your first impulse is to turn down invitations and stay home. Reach out to them. Everyone knows you are busy and burdened; they don’t judge you and are just glad to see you whenever they can.

Are you dating? HAHAHAHA! I know, right? It’s what everyone always asks when they see you again. If you actually are, make sure he’s worthy. Respect any red flags. And don’t go trying to find flags that truly aren’t there—that’s your baggage. If you are not with anyone, you’re probably perfectly happy anyway, and that’s just fine.

I hope the world opened back up and you were able to take some more fun trips this past year. And I hope you didn’t lose anyone to COVID, which is starting to rage again just when we all felt safe, or to anything else.

Keep taking good care of yourself. If you’ve learned anything as you’ve matured, it’s that life is precious and short. See your beloved friends and family (don’t see the ones that suck the life out of you if you don’t want to, and don’t feel bad about it). Take the trip. Eat the doughnut (just not a half dozen every day!). Be present for it all.

Optimistically,
Your 54-year-old self, December 2021

***

My notes on the contents:

I lost 80 pounds two years ago, and I keep re-gaining and re-losing 20 to 30. But I’ve kept 50 off consistently and still feel pretty good, so I’m proud of that.

Hubert was our guide in Peru, who wouldn’t let me give up even after the twentieth time I told the kids to leave me on the mountain and save themselves and say nice things at my funeral. The photos above are from that hike in 2018.

Indeed, my mother passed away—the day before my birthday. Many people said to me what I said to myself: it was her last birthday gift to me. If you think that sounds awful, well, it does, but as I share my stories, maybe you’ll understand. I took care of her for the last three years of her life, so I’m not an ogre. But she was a narcissist, and the years she didn’t talk to me (because I set a boundary she couldn’t bulldoze) were the most peaceful of my life. And as I’d suspected, I do not miss her, and I’m more sad about that than about her death, so I’m glad I thought to remind myself not to feel guilty. I had grieved her and our relationship a long time ago.**

Dan is my younger brother, who is in a nursing home with alcoholic memory loss, and he is still with us. He’s the father of my adopted dog, Buddy, whom I tried really hard to re-home when Dan was hospitalized and then homeless, but he was apparently meant to be mine. There’s a message in there, I’m sure.

I am not dating. And everyone still asks. Like Buddy, he’ll have to fall in my lap and be pretty damn near perfect and willing to sleep in separate bedrooms and maybe separate houses and maybe go away for a few weeks at a time, and then maybe (MAYBE) I’ll think about it.

I am still more of a hermit than I should be, but I’m trying.

Trip-wise, I was in my hometown a lot this year because I was taking care of Mom and then her estate. I spent a couple months in Florida; several friends, extended family members, and my other brother live there. I’m on my way back tomorrow! Some things are brewing, so we’ll see what 2023 brings.

*If this idea interests you, check out Future Me.

**On this topic of difficult mother-daughter relationships, Jennette McCurdy’s memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, is in my TBR pile. A memoir that really spoke to me this year was The Burning Light of Two Stars, by Laura Davis, who also cared for her mother at the end of her life after a long estrangement. I highly recommend this powerful and healing memoir.